Napoleonic War Horse

During the First Empire, the Ardennes horse was described as a small animal for riding and light draft renowned for its hardiness, its simplicity and its endurance. It long resisted the hardships of war and was considered a very good horse which deserved its reputation. These qualities are still the main part of the race to day.

Napoleon, who appreciated the qualities of race ordered their intersection with Arabian horses around 1810 to bring them back with little results. They are able to withstand weather and privations, the Ardennes were known as “the strongest beast and most durable of pays” and were used in the army.

Nervous and restless, its short and compact conformation in a horse was neither handsome nor distinguished, but it was an animal known for its substance, its strength and energy, endowed with long life and whose qualities were invaluable assets.

The morphology of the Ardennes reminded horses of the hussars, with a head of hair, a square and a little snub nose, prominent eyes, short ears and a well planted intelligent face. It measured between 1.42m and 1.52m and weighed about 500kg. It pulled the coaches and smaller vehicles such as, wagons, carts posts, and formed one fifth of the cavalry.

We are very far from a horse weighing nearly a ton today. In 1802, General Loison was stationed at Cork and ascended the 26th regiment of cavalry on young Ardennes horses purchased in haste who had resisted the German campaign in France and went “perfectly intact”. All the artillery horses of the day came from the Ardennes or Bretagne.

French Retreat in Moscow in 1812, painting Suchodolski January, 1844. The Russian campaign cost the lives of approximately 13,000 horses, only to have survived the Ardennes.

Soldiers who survived the Campaign of Russia expedition told that the Ardennes horses were content to any food and they were resistant to cold and fatigue. Ardennes horses’ survival became a local legend: “Napoleon highly prized qualities and their regiments were recruiting their horses home.

In the fatal retreat from Russia, the horses that resisted the longest, who endured hunger and fatigue, saw each other again, but in very small numbers, the field of victory’s departure, it was our little Ardennais.”

Ardennes in the Netherlands

Under the government of the Netherlands, the Lancers, stationed in Utrecht exclusively recovered the Ardennes and all horses culled were eagerly sought by the postmasters and contractors. Some observers of the artillery horses in Holland after the events of 1830 reported that some of the teams were drawn by horses of the Ardennes, “There were still some old remnants of Waterloo, the other horses in Holland and Germany. The deprivation, bad weather and the camp had, during this short campaign, reduced them to skeletons, the Ardennes, on the contrary, were retained as when they departed.

Degeneration of the race

In 1815, all valid horses of the country were commandeered by the Napoleonic armies, so that there remained almost nothing about the race, except a few animals of “an immeasurable poverty”. The farmers of the country were exhausted as were the rest of Europe. Private industry saw itself abandoned, and the stud Walferdange “was not likely to make the horse saddle Ardennes its ancient merited old reputation”.

In 1834, the Ardennes race was degenerate as a result of samples taken by the military and a bad reputation. The remaining animals are described as such: “The head is always right but it is heavy, thick, charged with ganache, badly dressed, expressionless and without mercy.

The neck is thin and poor, the tourniquet pressed, the back line and kidneys decrease in stretching, rump is a lectern and the defective tail faces down, the coast is flat, belly swallows the projection of the hips which are excessive and unsightly, the forelimb is slender and weak especially compared to the volume of the body and weight it must bear, the knee is thin, erased: the tendon is almost glued to the bone nail and is brittle and the plantar surface tends to be thin.

The average size increased from 4cm to 6cm on average; temperament is less resistant, with more lymphatic muscle that is the opposite of the horse of yesteryear, it follows that the unique qualities of the Ardennes that were bred.”

The new requirements of riding military did also represent a foreclosure on the Ardennes horses. The first is the lack of size, because the horses most likely serve the light cavalry and therefore were several centimeters below the limit set.

The second is the weight of the forearm. It was necessary that the neck had a lever arm stretched over so that we can restore and sustain the head. The line of gravity of the head and neck was not to fall in front of the base of support represented by the forelimbs, while horse-mounted with its center of gravity not falling behind the tourniquet. This defect rendered the Ardennes less manageable, and the struggle of man against man, in the encounter of a melee, the rider’s life was more exposed.